A densely layered experience such as Peter Greenaway's Nightwatching challenges a critic's ability to rearrange something that has been especially sculpted for cinematic presentation. Translating film content into prose is often easy; at least, a summary description is usually accessible to one used to working with words. But Greenaway has fashioned a film that unites so many ideas and textures - many of which are utterly foreign to mainstream filmmaking - that it is difficult to arrive at a fair representation of them for the purposes of a review.
